100 Years of the Dictionary of the Egyptian Language

Each slip held a few lines of Egyptian text with a translation, and every copy had one word underlined. Filed alphabetically, they became what the museum calls a "database" of more than a million slips by 1910. Adolf Erman's team began that work here in 1897, so you're standing in the building where the card boxes started.

The show is a small cabinet display in the Mythological Hall, built from objects in the dictionary's own archive, tracing the route from Egyptian texts to the printed book. War and inflation stalled the printing until a 1924 gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Volume 1 appeared in 1926, reproduced from Wolja Erichsen's handwritten manuscript.

The Berlin Academy calls it a look behind the scenes of Egyptology: come for how scholarship gets made, not for treasure. The show's page lists only the Neues Museum ticket (€14, concessions €7). Curator tours, free with a ticket and no booking needed, run 28 October and 9 December at 5pm and 14 November at 3pm.